In conventional 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) networks, telecommunication operators transmit data mainly through respective licensed bands; however, the efficiency of this kind of data transmission is limited by the bandwidth of the licensed bands. Accordingly, the licensed assisted access (LAA) technology has thus been developed.
Specifically, the LAA technology mainly uses licensed bands to transmit control messages and uses unlicensed bands to assist in transmitting network data. In this way, by using the unlicensed bands, the network data transmission efficiency can be effectively improved. The unlicensed band selection and the communication scheduling of the data transmission are all dominated by the base station; however, this technology has a drawback that the network resource use efficiency is low.
In detail, in the communication scheduling of the LAA technology, communication interference to the mobile station may be formed in a contention region when different base stations select a same unlicensed band. On the other hand, when different base stations select different unlicensed bands, the network resource cannot be reused in a contention free region. Furthermore, because the base station needs to be responsible for the band selection and the Listen Before Talk (LBT) procedure of all mobile stations, the load of the base station will become a bottleneck in performance as the number of the mobile stations increases.
Accordingly, an urgent need exists in the art to overcome the drawbacks of the aforesaid conventional LAA technology, improve the network resource use efficiency and meanwhile reduce the load of the base station.